Next generation electronic circuits, displays, data storages and other applications may be required to be flexible. Silicon may not be a good material for flexible electronic applications as silicon is brittle.
Attaching individual silicon chips onto a flexible plastic substrate may lead to reliability issues and high fabrication costs.
Device structures, including circuits, may be fabricated on the flexible substrates. Nanomaterial films such as carbon nanotube films and silicon nanowire films, etc may be transferred to a flexible substrate before being patterned. Metallic connections may also be formed on the flexible substrate. Multiple deposition and patterning steps may be required to be carried out on the flexible substrate to fabricate the device. For instance, carbon nanotube (CNT) based organic light emitting diodes (OLED) may be fabricated by transferring CNT films to a flexible substrate, patterning the source/drain (S/D) electrodes, electrically isolating each device, depositing dielectric layers, forming vias and interconnects etc. on the flexible substrates. Thus, several photolithographic, metallization and etching steps are required.
There are technical difficulties to implement all of these steps on flexible substrates, especially for thin substrates on a large scale. Fabricating device structures, including circuits on flexible substrates may inherently result in poor performance of the devices.